In general, as shown in FIG. 1, a multilayer ceramic capacitor 10 includes a ceramic body 12 having a pair of external electrodes 14A and 14B respectively formed at two opposite end portions thereof. The ceramic body 12 is fabricated by sintering a laminated body formed of alternately stacked dielectric layers 16 and internal electrodes 18. Each pair of neighboring internal electrodes 18 faces each other with a dielectric layer 16 intervened therebetween and is electrically coupled to different external electrodes 14A and 14B, respectively.
The dielectric layers 16 are made of a reduction resistive ceramic compound including, e.g., barium titanate (BT) as a major component and an oxide of rare-earth elements. The internal electrodes 18 are formed by sintering a conductive paste whose main component is, e.g., Ni metal powder.
The ceramic body 12 is produced by forming a chip-shaped laminated body with alternately stacked ceramic green sheets and internal electrode patterns, removing a binder off the chip-shaped laminated body, sintering the binder removed laminated body in a non-oxidative atmosphere at a high temperature ranging from 1200° C. to 1300° C., and finally re-oxidizing the sintered laminated body in an oxidative atmosphere.
Recent trend for ever more miniaturized and dense electric circuits demands for a further scaled-down multilayer ceramic capacitor with higher capacitance. Keeping up with such demand, there has been made an effort to fabricate thinner dielectric layers and to stack a greater number of the smaller-sized dielectric layers.
However, when the dielectric layers of the multilayer ceramic capacitor are thinned out, the electric field intensity per one layer increases and, thus, the operating life of the multilayer ceramic capacitor becomes shortened.